It was during the mid-session break in the Wednesday
morning knock-out game at the Buffalo Spooktacular Regional Tournament that the
director came to our table to break the bad news. Our fifth player, who was
supposed to fill in on our team on Thursday, would be ineligible. She was
playing in the pairs event Wednesday at the same time we were playing in the
knock-outs. Not allowed.
That
would be a good problem to have, we told the director. At that point we had
played 12 hands against a couple from Halifax, Nova Scotia (teamed at the last
minute with a couple women from Rochester), and we were down more than 30
International Match Points. Could we make it up in the next 12 hands? Our
opponents did that to us on Tuesday and knocked us out. This time, however, it
was not meant to be. In the first group of six boards, a veritable festival of
small contracts and part scores, we prevailed by a margin of 2 IMPs to 1. In
the second group of six, we sank even deeper into defeat.
So it
was back to the side game in the afternoon. Open pairs with the 299ers mixed in
because there weren’t enough of them for a separate section. That obliged the
directors to recalibrate the stratifications. Joe Miranda and I, who started
out in the B start, were put in with the big guys in A.
Not
that it should matter. A good score is a good score and I felt we were on our
way to one. Joe and I finally seemed to be perfectly attuned, at least until
the last couple rounds. I was shocked that the score didn’t reflect my good
feelings. We wound up tied for fifth out of nine pairs East-West with a 47.92%
score, suppressed by two bottom boards in our final round.
We would have had to
beat 51.62% to win red points. Take away our three worst hands – those two
bottom boards and an ill-fated 5 Clubs doubled vulnerable contract that Joe
should have shifted back to my original bid of Diamonds – and we’d be 10 match points
better, good enough to finish third and earn 1.11 red. Well, there’s always
tomorrow.
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